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#Inaug2013: Taking a Twitter deep dive

Twitter said it handled 1.1 million tweets Monday related to the ceremonies. | Reuters

But then there was “Basketball Wives” figure Evelyn Lozada’s exuberant remark: “Michelle Obama’s entire outfit is giving me LIFE!!!! Yasssssss!!!” That got more than 1,300 retweets. Anthony Spears, aka @Lohanthony, tweeted about how Obama is the “chillest dude” ever, and that garnered 1,200 retweets. And Christiana Mbakwe, aka @Christiana1987, saw more than 2,300 retweets for: “Obama's being inaugurated, it's Martin Luther King Day and Beyonce's singing the anthem. Black folk are having the best Monday EVER.”

“It’s the information flow that counts, not the popularity,” said Jonny Bentwood, Edelman’s London-based lead technologist on the project. “People have always talked about search engine optimization. What we’re talking about now is social search optimization. We want to find out there’s conversations in areas that we weren’t aware of.”

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Applying this software to a political event was an experiment for Edelman, whose aim with Flow140 is to help its clients keep watch on social media so they can engage influential tweeters when they talk about their brands.

But as they pored over the data from a ninth floor conference room a couple of miles from the Capitol, the tech team kept finding intriguing sidelights.

Among them was the fact that policy discussions took a backseat. Edelman tech team member Ryan Zimmerman, who was tasked with watching for searches that crossed the Inauguration with “debt ceiling” and “fiscal cliff,” saw no significant clusters of retweets around those issues. Across the table, colleague David Dziok was keeping watch on conservative chatter and found just one tweet worth mentioning — a remark by former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) grousing after a gun control reference: “Obama proposing $4.5B in new spending for gun control. Coincidentally, same amount people have spent buying guns since he proposed it. #tcot”

The tool allowed for some drilling down, so that when Obama made a reference to “Stonewall” — as in the inn where the modern gay rights movement began — it fell to Zimmerman to be able to see whose tweets were lighting up around that word. The answer, he deduced within about two minutes, was @ase, whose retweet of a @CatholicDems remark was then passed along dozens of times.

Hollywood starpower did have a great deal of influence on the day. “Vampire Diaries” star Ian Somerhalder’s tweet that he lost his inaugural ticket got picked up thousands of times. So did a photo tweeted by Katy Perry of a pin of Aretha Franklin’s 2009 hat. And even Bette Midler got some traction with a remark about how Vice President Joe Biden “has no bangs.”

This power of celebrity was never so obvious as when Obama shook Roberts’s hand after reciting the oath.

“Everybody’s still talking about Beyoncé,” Zimmerman said of the songstress who dominated the Twitter-verse from start to finish.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 5:21 p.m. on January 21, 2013.